skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


This content will become publicly available on July 8, 2026

Title: Secure iOS mHealth Apps Development: An IDE-Embedded Framework for HIPAA-Aware Coding
With the rapid growth of technology, accessing digital health records has become increasingly easier. Especially mobile health technology like mHealth apps help users to manage their health information, as well as store, share and access medical records and treatment information. Along with this huge advancement, mHealth apps are increasingly at risk of exposing protected health information (PHI) when security measures are not adequately implemented. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ensures the secure handling of PHI, and mHealth applications are required to comply with its standards. But it is unfortunate to note that many mobile and mHealth app developers, along with their security teams, lack sufficient awareness of HIPAA regulations, leading to inadequate implementation of compliance measures. Moreover, the implementation of HIPAA security should be integrated into applications from the earliest stages of development to ensure data security and regulatory adherence throughout the software lifecycle. This highlights the need for a comprehensive framework that supports developers from the initial stages of mHealth app development and fosters HIPAA compliance awareness among security teams and end users. An iOS framework has been designed for integration into the Integrated Development Environment(IDE), accompanied by a web application to visualize HIPAA security concerns in mHealth app development. The web application is intended to guide both developers and security teams on HIPAA compliance, offering insights on incorporating regulations into source code, with the IDE framework enabling the identification and resolution of compliance violations during development. The aim is to encourage the design of secure and compliant mHealth applications that effectively safeguard personal health information.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2433800 2421324 1946442
PAR ID:
10621464
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1101-1107
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
HIPAA Compliance mHealth Applications iOS Development Xcode Integration Swift Package Manager (SPM) HIPAA Checker Developer Awareness Security Framework
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Toronto, Canada
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; (, Conference on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice)
    The security threats to mobile application are growing explosively. Mobile app flaws and security defects could open doors for hackers to easily attack mobile apps. Secure software development must be addressed earlier in the development life cycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking. Early eliminating against possible security vulnerability will help us increase the security of software and mitigate the consequence of damages of data loss caused by potential malicious attacking. In this paper, we present a static security analysis approach with open source FindSecurityBugs plugin for Android Studio IDE. We demonstrate that integration of the plugin enables developers secure mobile application and mitigating security risks during implementation time in Android Studio IDE. We demonstrate that integration of the plugin enables developers secure mobile application and mitigating security risks during implementation time. Secure software development must be addressed earlier in the development lifecycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking. Early eliminating against possible security vulnerability will help us increase the security of software and mitigate the consequence of damages of data loss caused by potential malicious attacking. In this paper, we present a static security analysis approach with open source FindSecurityBugs plugin for Android Studio IDE. We demonstrate that integration of the plugin enables developers secure mobile application and mitigating security risks during implementation time. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al (, IEEE)
    Although software developers of mHealth apps are responsible for protecting patient data and adhering to strict privacy and security requirements, many of them lack awareness of HIPAA regulations and struggle to distinguish between HIPAA rules categories. Therefore, providing guidance of HIPAA rules patterns classification is essential for developing secured applications for Google Play Store. In this work, we identified the limitations of traditional Word2Vec embeddings in processing code patterns. To address this, we adopt multilingual BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) which offers contextualized embeddings to the attributes of dataset to overcome the issues. Therefore, we applied this BERT to our dataset for embedding code patterns and then uses these embedded code to various machine learning approaches. Our results demonstrate that the models significantly enhances classification performance, with Logistic Regression achieving a remarkable accuracy of 99.95%. Additionally, we obtained high accuracy from Support Vector Machine (99.79%), Random Forest (99.73%), and Naive Bayes (95.93%), outperforming existing approaches. This work underscores the effectiveness and showcases its potential for secure application development. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC 2018))
    The security threats to mobile application are growing explosively. Mobile app flaws and security defects could open doors for hackers to easily attack mobile apps. Secure software development must be addressed earlier in the development lifecycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking. Early eliminating against possible security vulnerability will help us increase the security of our software, and militate the consequence of damages of data loss caused by potential malicious attacking. However, many software developer professionals lack the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage and Secure Mobile Software Development (SMSD) is not yet well represented in current computing curriculum. In this paper we present a static security analysis approach with open source FindSecurityBugs plugin for Android Studio IDE. We categorized the common mobile vulnerability for developers based on OWASP mobile security recommendations and developed detectors to meet the SMSD needs in industry and education. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; (, 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC 2018))
    The security threats to mobile application are growing explosively. Mobile app flaws and security defects could open doors for hackers to easily attack mobile apps. Secure software development must be addressed earlier in the development lifecycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking. Early eliminating against possible security vulnerability will help us increase the security of our software, and militate the consequence of damages of data loss caused by potential malicious attacking. However, many software developer professionals lack the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage and Secure Mobile Software Development (SMSD) is not yet well represented in current computing curriculum. In this paper we present a static security analysis approach with open source FindSecurityBugs plugin for Android Studio IDE. We categorized the common mobile vulnerability for developers based on OWASP mobile security recommendations and developed detectors to meet the SMSD needs in industry and education. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; (, 2018 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC))
    The security threats to mobile applications are growing explosively. Mobile apps flaws and security defects open doors for hackers to break in and access sensitive information. Defensive requirements analysis should be an integral part of secure mobile SDLC. Developers need to consider the information confidentiality and data integrity, to verify the security early in the development lifecycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking and data leaks take place. Early eliminating known security vulnerabilities will help developers increase the security of apps and reduce the likelihood of exploitation. However, many software developers lack the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage, and that's why Secure Mobile Software Development education is very necessary for mobile software engineers. In this paper, we propose a guided security requirement analysis based on OWASP Mobile Top ten security risk recommendations for Android mobile software development and its traceability of the developmental controls in SDLC. Building secure apps immune to the OWASP Mobile Top ten risks would be an effective approach to provide very useful mobile security guidelines. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email